Everyone Is...with Jennifer Coronado
The intent of this show is to engage with all types of people and build an understanding that anyone who has any kind of success has achieved that success because they are creative thinkers. So whether you are an artist, a cook, a bottle washer, or an award-winning journalist, everyone has something to contribute to the human conversation.
Everyone Is...with Jennifer Coronado
Stefan Dechant: Design Nerds Rule!
For this episode, we are thrilled to have Stefan Dechant, the Oscar-nominated production designer whose imagination and desire to tell stories has stretched from the Spielberg-tinged streets of his Ohio childhood to working with legends like Saul Bass, to Industrial Light & Magic, to design opportunities on a myriad of Robert Zemeckis films, and more! As we peel back the layers of Stefan's illustrious (see what we did there) career, we uncover the influences of his youth and how a simple love for drawing evolved into designing some of cinema's most unforgettable worlds.
Stefan's story is a tale of taking chances and moving into uncomfortable spaces and roles to achieve your goals. Stefan also has no qualms about letting you know that imposter syndrome is real, and what you need to do to overcome it is jump into the creative and hope that it lifts you up and you surf on its waves!
www.slightlyprod.com
My career has been kind of like running on top of crocodiles, you know. I just kept moving from one thing to the other and trying not to get, you know, eaten.
Stefan Dechant:Hello and welcome to Everyone Is. I am your host, jennifer Coronado. The intent of this show is to engage with all types of people and build an understanding that anyone who has any kind of success has achieved that success because they are a creative thinker success has achieved that success because they are a creative thinker. So, whether you are an artist or a cook or an award-winning journalist, everyone has something to contribute to the human conversation. And now, as they say on with the show Hi, it's me, jen. I wanted to jump in here to admit that this week's episode had some audio challenges, but we thought it was an interesting conversation, so we still wanted to share with our listeners. So please forgive the long-distance telephone sound of it all and enjoy the vibes.
Stefan Dechant:Stefan Decken is a production designer, and an Oscar-nominated one at that. He was nominated in 2021 for his amazing work on the Tra, the tragedy of Macbeth, directed by Joel Cohen, and in his career has worked on 30 plus films, including, but not limited to, the original Jurassic Park, castaway Minority Report, as well as the first Avatar film. So welcome, stefan, to Everyone Is. Thank you. Thank you for having me. The whole idea of this is to talk to people about how they think about things creatively. You grew up near Chagrin Falls, ohio, is that?
Jennifer Coronado:right, yeah, yeah. Home of Tim Conway.
Stefan Dechant:What was it like to grow up there?
Jennifer Coronado:If you want to think of what typical suburbia was like in the Midwest, that would place it down there. We were outside of Cleveland, you know. So it's a Rust Belt city called Bainbridge. But you know, I'm still to this day probably not even sure what my dad did. He worked in management upper management of electronics companies in Cleveland and my sister, who's two years younger than myself, we just grew up on a track home not a track home, but every house looked the same and in a development where you could ride your bike, you know, to see your friends.
Jennifer Coronado:I think that's why when I was a kid and I would watch Spielberg films, in some ways they really connected with me. Like that, felt like oh, that's my childhood. The thing I couldn't connect was the California of it all. You know, when I would see how massive those developments were, they weren't as massive as what we had. It was kind of idyllic in its vanilla kind of way. I'm not sure I'm describing that well, but you know, my mom was an English teacher, my dad worked in an office and my sister and I we went to like Catholic grade school and then we'd come home and play with the kids on the block Catholic grade school and then we'd come home and play with the kids on the block and I probably consumed way more media than I should have, and so I was always fascinated by, I would get hooked on certain shows or whatnot, and then I was always interested in how they made them. So when I was very young I watched this show about firefighters, called Emergency, and I was really into that. But at the same time my grandparents went out to California to visit relatives and they took pictures at Universal Studios and I was like, oh, I knew that Universal was the emblem that was at the end of the television show, and so I was really interested in how they made that. And then the same thing there was a horrible show out of the UK called Space 1999 that I used to watch, which was kind of like a Star Trek ripoff. I loved the spaceships and how they did that. I was just always interested in how they made those.
Jennifer Coronado:And then Star Wars came out and I was like prime age. I was like around eight, you know I knocked my socks off because the imagery was so evocative and unlike anything I had seen before, and how it was presented and on the scope it was presented, and so I lived in my imagination, in that world which, at that time, there was no toys or anything, there was no product to kind of keep you engaged in that IP. It was just that Star Wars had come out and all you could do at least I could do was draw pictures of it or think about it or pick up a comic book. And then, I think it was in October or September of that year, the Making Of came out, and that's the first time I saw the drawings by Ralph McQuarrie and Joe Johnston. And then, you know, that kind of hooked me both in the sense that you can get paid for doing that. I don't even think that getting paid was part of it. It was like, oh, there's a job where you can be creative and you can draw.
Jennifer Coronado:And then also, what I was always obsessed with was the variations, the versions that didn't make it to screen. What is that? It was like there were other avenues, paths not taken, that there might've been another universe that had the design in there that I was seeing. You know, if you look at those first Ralph McQuarrie's I think they were done on like the third or fourth draft script. They were very early, all that kind of fed into my love of drawing, which I always loved to draw. I was always drawing. I want to ask you about that real quick.
Stefan Dechant:When did you start? Did you start playing as a little little kid, or when did you start playing with drawing? Yeah, I was always drawing.
Jennifer Coronado:I don't know why, it was just something I needed to do and I like to draw and I always and I have to tell you this, I've realized this love with having kids now. And I have to tell you this, I've realized this love with having kids now. There were certain illustrators that I gravitated towards and that I liked and this will sound strange, but even like when I was like three, between three and five, I loved golden books and I loved that gouache painting and I loved the world that was being built in there because it's somehow I was kind of familiar with it because you would, let's say it was 1930s or 1940s. I knew that I was living not then I'm thinking this is a very young child but I knew that it felt like my grandparents house, so I knew that it came before and I loved like falling into that imagery and this I mean it sounds so crazy, but I remember like yesterday, you know, like there was a book it was called Seven Little Postmen and it was all these illustrations in there. But I remember like the way the city was painted felt like rain was about to happen and I loved that.
Jennifer Coronado:I was very attracted to the illustrations in those books, like my grandparents had this encyclopedia that had Charles Knight paintings of dinosaurs. Charles Knight set the tone on what a T-Rex looked like. It didn't change until pretty much, jurassic Park. You know just everything you would see in King Kong, and even the Allosaurus and Valley of Gwangi is like that. It's Charles Knight.
Stefan Dechant:Well, I want to ask you about that, because you mentioned something that I think is really interesting, which it and it kind of plays into who you are as a production designer. It seems like as a little kid you had this sense of when things looked different and that it represented different times. Do you think that was innate, or was that something that you got from your parents? Or was that just a sense of?
Jennifer Coronado:I think it was innate. I loved looking at those imagery, the imagery, and then, I don't know why, I thought about it. There's different times and I can't think of what was at my grandparents on my mom's side. That would make like it was a little town in Ohio and all the houses were kind of Victorian. If they weren't Victorian there was this little, you know, post-war build boom that happened in there. So they were late 40s, early 50s. There was an antiquity to that and a comfort that I felt in there. So I loved being in that town and I liked being with my grandparents and my relatives were very close. It was a big Catholic family that my mom came from and I liked that, so that all kind of wove into the feelings that I was getting. There was kind of a nostalgia that was already building in there that I liked. And then I don't know where drawing came in. I just I was always drawing.
Jennifer Coronado:In the early 70s computer printouts were on this white and green paper. My dad would bring those home because we could just draw on the back of them. So there was always stuff there to create with. But my parents weren't like and this is not a knock against them. I just don't think they saw it as something to kind of feed. They just saw it as something that I was interested in. And you know so, if my dad went on a business trip, it was a bigger deal back then. So if he came back from like California, there was always like a drawing pad and markers and stuff like that and, again, I think, some of the obsessions with the imagery that I was seeing on television, since you couldn't go out easily and get a toy that represented that. You know, drawing it was the best way.
Stefan Dechant:That was also a time when it wasn't like oh, I'll just pull that up on the internet and watch that again, or I'll rewind that. It's like it was a fleeting moment in time, so you were trying to capture it.
Jennifer Coronado:Exactly, that's exactly it. And also it wasn't like you could find it at the bookstore and it's not like my parents were taking me to hunt that stuff out, and it was just a different time. I mean, most of playing was just like going outdoors or hanging out with your friends. You know, it wasn't until I was in high school or maybe junior high, you know we didn't have video games or anything like that. So, yeah, I think it was. It was a way to hold on to those things.
Stefan Dechant:Do you think that helped with your imagination Like that, that time of that spare time, because it feels like now we're so filled up with things to do constantly.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, probably, probably, and probably wanting to recreate those stories. And even the toys that I had when I was a kid, they weren't like, they had a story to them. There was a company called Marks and they made these like you've got a box full of dinosaurs and cavemen and caves and whatnot and that can keep me pretty busy for days on end. You know you're just creating those stories, you know. So I was watching a lot of Saturday morning cartoons and I and they used to have live action shows like Land of the Lost and stuff like that and that all fed into that. Those obsessions. Really they're like childhood obsessions, you know that you're you're just kind of fetishizing the designs and the characters and I was so into my own stuff that I wasn't as a kid, I really wasn't a reader, like I would read and then put a book down and be like I'm just going to draw the picture. I'd rather do that.
Jennifer Coronado:I was a major nerd, I didn't know how to interact socially with other kids really. And then it's funny because if I look at the Cleveland Plain Dealer now the local paper really and then it's funny because if I look at the Cleveland Plain Dealer now the local paper, it might have two stories of national or local interest. And then sports. So when I was a kid, that school, the elementary school, was like it was sports, sports, sports. And I was just like, oh my God, I'm not good at sports. But then when I got to college I was like, hey, this is. I don't have to be accepted on these terms. So my dating life was better. I had friends. I wasn't the best student, probably my first year. It was just some place that my life was changing for the better and I liked it.
Stefan Dechant:So you went to the University of Cincinnati, right.
Jennifer Coronado:Yes, I did.
Stefan Dechant:What'd you study there, you?
Jennifer Coronado:went to the University of Cincinnati, right? Yes, I did. What'd you study there? I studied graphic design because I didn't know what it was. There's two reasons. One I studied graphic design because I thought it was commercial art. For some reason I saw myself as having a career of maybe the guy that draws people wearing Hager slacks in Sears magazines Like I. Just it was commercial art and I thought, oh, that's interesting to me. I also liked that they had that pro. They had a program there where you could intern. So you went. They were quarters at that time, so you went to school for a quarter and then you worked for a quarter. You went to school for a quarter and went to work for a quarter, and my biggest fear was not having a job and living with my parents. And so I thought commercial art seems good at getting a job, seems good to me.
Jennifer Coronado:At the time I quickly realized it was graphic design. It was about typography, which I had no interest in Thank God for the digital revolution. That happened while I was there because I really didn't care for it. I just had no love of it. And we had these wonderful professors and they were like if you don't love this, you should get out of this program because you're not going to make money doing it either.
Jennifer Coronado:I thought about that and I had a rough year, my freshman year, and I came home and then my dad said maybe you're studying the wrong thing, maybe you should work at that place that does the effects for Star Wars. That was something that kind of was a through line through my childhood. It's like again there was less information available so you'd get a making of Star Wars book or making of Empire Strikes Back, but there wasn't books like that for every film that came out and there just wasn't a lot of print and you wouldn't get it in chagrin falls, ohio if you did, you know. So it was something it seemed too far away. But once my dad brought it up and then I was working at jp morgan that was my first internship through uh the university, cincinnati. I was working at the in in their in-house design department.
Jennifer Coronado:I remember reading it. It was in the New York Times. It was about unemployment and homelessness and there was some guy who was a graphic designer and was making. I forget how much he was bringing in a year, but now he's living on the street and I was like this is it. I've got to go where it feels right, what I want to do. And that's when I started, like I made a game plan, like I'm going to get to industrial light magic. Somehow I'm going to meet somebody that can get me in the door there and that's how I'm going to get a job.
Stefan Dechant:That's not necessarily a game plan. That's like wishing into the universe and then moving on it Right. Or did you have a? Did you have?
Jennifer Coronado:I had a game plan. Well, let's think's think about it. Yeah, it is a little bit wishing, but here's the thing that I was thinking about. Like I was thinking about being in the right place at the right time, and these are like as a 20 year old thinks about things, right. So I was thinking about being in the right place at the right time and I thought I need to be in san francisco.
Jennifer Coronado:And when I couldn't get an internship because that was all reserved for juniors and seniors and I was a sophomore in San Francisco, the jobs that had been lined up I knew that I needed to be in a big city. So I'm going to go, I'm going to be in New York and somehow I'll meet somebody that has something to do with the film industry. I'm going to try that. And then when I was working at JP Morgan, I remember in Mac it was either Mac Week or Mac World or one of those type magazines there was an article about Photoshop and that John Tom Knoll had written this program and that John worked at ILM. And I thought that's my ticket in. I've got to figure out how I can get a copy of Photoshop, how I can learn that, and that's going to be it. So maybe it was wishful thinking, but it was also kind of like I want to be in the right place at the right time.
Stefan Dechant:Well, you did intern at ILM, and you interned with Saul Bass too. I did.
Jennifer Coronado:One of the things I feel very strongly about is reaching out and helping young kids getting into the film industry, and this will lead to ILM and Saul. But when I was at JP Morgan, I was working there on a weekend and one of the other designers had come in. She said well, what are you interested in? What kind of design firm would you like to work? Well, what do you want to do with your career? And I said I don't want to do anything, I just want to get letters of recommendation so I could go to USC and study film. And I wanted to work at ILM. And she said oh, I know this guy, stuart Robertson. He's the head of the optical department at ILM. You should give him a call. In fact.
Stefan Dechant:I'll give him for lunch in a month. And he said yeah.
Jennifer Coronado:And I don't know anyone who would commit to that. Maybe he was thinking I wouldn't come out. But I bought a plane ticket and I came out and I met Stuart and he gave me a tour of ILM and then I would write him every three months to keep that relationship up. And that's eventually how I did get my internship at ILM. And this woman who sent me over Stuart Robertson, who got me a tour of our Greenberg Associates, saw Bass. His firm, bass Yeager, had a relationship with the University of Cincinnati and took students and I applied to be an intern there and I know it was between myself and another student who was going to get that job. But what set me apart was because I had met the people at Art Greenberg and I knew that Saul did titles and I was interested in titles and I was interested in film. So that little leg up, that kind of kindness that was given to me, it was kind of like a little gem that I had a secret password that allowed me to work for Saul.
Jennifer Coronado:When I say work for Saul, I mixed paints. That's a lot of my job. It was called Chromatex. You don't do the same work because you can get a color printer. But at the time if you wanted to lay out a logo or whatnot in color, you had to mix the paint custom and then you had to lay it on a piece of plastic, then you'd lay the glue on there and then the designers could go rub that down and it was a pretty noxious job. So when I say I worked at Saul Bass, I made a lot of.
Stefan Dechant:I made a lot of work down yeah.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, but it was still cool to be there. And again, the people that you come across that just have this kindness and willingness to let you see behind the curtain his archivist, I remember one weekend he said let's meet at the studio. We went there, we went in the basement and I saw all the original storyboards for Psycho and the opening of West Side Story. It was cool. He gave me all these Japanese magazines that had articles about Saul. It's like oh, we have tons of these, take them in. So that was what's wonderful.
Jennifer Coronado:And actually that led me to ILM, because Harley Jessup, who was running the art department, was a big fan of Saul, and so that's how I got my job at ILM. I remember on the phone he's like listen, I really don't, you're not going to be doing what you think you're going to be doing at ILM. And I said, no, right now I'm just leaving a job at Solvass where I'm buying birthday cakes and whatnot. You know, I like I know that, but I need to get inside and see it. You know, somehow things just felt lucky. Yeah, and I'm not. I don't know what I believe. To tell you the truth, I don't know if I believe in bigger things happening? I'm going to say yes Because I remember before I got the job at ILM, I got off the phone with Harley and it had been a couple of weeks and I had a dream that I was walking through the front doors on Kerner and Stuart Robertson answered the door and he said congratulations, and then we just walked through the lobby and that was the end of the dream.
Jennifer Coronado:And then about a week later I got a call that I got the job at ILM, and so sometimes I see my career as kind of like surfing. I'm trying to look at the waves. The waves could be anything like what do you think is happening? Who do you think you need to meet? Where do you think you need to go? But a lot of it's a force of nature that I'm just reckoning with.
Stefan Dechant:I want to ask you two questions about the internships, and I want you to look at it two ways. And the first way was I'm a young kid coming in here to be an intern and here's what I expect to learn. And then the other way to look at it is I'm Stefan of now, and here's what I actually learned when you were in those internships?
Jennifer Coronado:That's a really good question. When you were working as an intern, that's a really good question, I think. When I went in to ILM, I thought that I could maybe learn how to storyboard and see how it's done and then work on the weekends and improve my craft. And what I realized was that I lacked those drawing skills. I lacked the the hardcore design skills that that was needed for that job. Now I could be there and see it happening. But, um, as a kid I think that was my expectation. But I had wonderful mentors there. You know Ty Ellingston, who is a designer, has worked a lot with Guillermo and did a lot of design work on Avatar for Cameron. He kind of took me under his wing and I remember one night we were having beers and he goes. I just want you to know you're really not that good and if you're going to work here, you've got to be better. And I didn't take it as an insult, I just thought, yeah, he's right, I really need to work on things. So I had an expectation of doing that. But in a sense, some of that happened. We only had one Mac in the art department and if you wanted to use Photoshop, get in line and I was asked could I composite this car in front of these buildings and could I bend the buildings like they were blowing in the wind? It was Steve Beck and he had a beautiful marker rendering of the car. All he wanted was the car cut out and put in and the building's bent. I'm like, yeah, I can do that and it's the kind of thing you give an intern right. But I stayed all night to repaint the car so it looked photo real and had the paint coming off and I don't know how good it was, but they loved it. And then they had some more commercial stuff and they gave me. So in some ways my expectations were met. Okay, so that's my kid's point of view. As an adult, looking back, there's a couple of things I learned. One is I learned that ILM was a vendor. It wasn't like Star Wars, it wasn't like you were building all that stuff up from scratch. A lot of this stuff had been designed, I think. Also, I learned how to navigate production and then the person who's directing it and then the, the art department. I got to see what that was like in terms of you know cultures and working around and seeing how those people work together. It's such a good question. I think part of it is. I've told this story so often that I make my own myth up, and so it's hard for me to kind of like look at it, you know, like when you start creating your own story.
Jennifer Coronado:One of the best pieces of advice I got from there, doug Chang. He was showing me his reel that he had before he went to Iowa and he said you know what you should do. You should make up your own project and storyboard it. And so I did. What I wanted to do was ultimately be a PA on Jurassic Park at ILM, and so when I came back to Cincinnati, I hit the professors up to write a screenplay for Jurassic Park just the T-Rex attack and then I would storyboard it and I would typeset those storyboards. So that was how it'd be graphic design. So I'd make a book and my boards would be in there, and that ended up being a really important thing for me when I went for my job at Jurassic Park. That was why Rick Carter, the production designer, hired me. The way that Doug John Bell, mark Moore, harley, ty, mark Moore, harley, ty, paul Houston, claudia Mullally, you know the way that they helped guide me was so important that, as an adult, I'm very conscious of that, and so I like bringing in PAs.
Jennifer Coronado:I like bringing in people who have that experience underneath their belt and then going well, how can I guide this person to get what they want out of their career? Like, ultimately, maybe my role as a designer is not really to kind of go. People look back and go oh did you ever see the work that Stefan did? But maybe my role as a designer is actually I'm in a place that I can help other people achieve things, and maybe greater things than I've done.
Stefan Dechant:Well, I want to jump into that because you know you are a production designer now, but you've played several roles in film art departments. You've been an illustrator, a storyboard artist, an art director, a supervising art director, you know, and now production designer. But for people who don't know, I like to dive into some of the differences between roles. So's start with the illustrator, and am I allowed to mention Waterworld?
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, waterworld, listen, the first three films I had were the first one was Jurassic Park yeah, right, so that was pretty cool, right, I met Steven, I got it. I had a photograph in Cinefix Childhood dream I was in the making of book. Couldn't get any better. Next film is, uh, forrest Gump best picture, right, working with Zemeckis pretty cool. Third film is Waterworld, and I learned it's really, really important that you're working with people that you love, because you could be on a film for two years, but that film is only going to be in the theaters for two hours at the moment.
Stefan Dechant:Yeah, yeah. So let me ask you that what does an illustrator do on a film Like what is their role in the film.
Jennifer Coronado:Basically, you're working with the production designer to get their vision of what the look of that film is on paper. So at the time when I started, the way that you did that was they could be pencil sketches, they could be marker sketches, or there would also be people. Part of the way that you did that was it could be pencil sketches, it could be marker sketches, or there'd be there also be people who did amazing gouache paintings, right. So those were kind of like the three, three ways of kind of doing it. And you, you either laying out an environment you know, this is, this is what the environment looks like, this is what the streets gonna look like when we redress it or could be more conceptual, like this is what this kind of special vehicle is going to look like. And I got into that role because I knew photoshop and so I wasn't a great illustrator, like like I said, but no one else was doing photoshop and I could do things that the effects house had seen before, ilm had seen it, but people in our departments had. So I remember thinking that I wasn't really providing what they probably wanted on Forrest Gump, so I needed to save my job somehow. So on my own. I scanned in a drawing that James Haggis had done of Sally Field's home and I was modeling it out as super blocky, super blocky 3D models very primitive. But then I painted over that in Photoshop so it could look photo real and then I thought I'm probably going to get in trouble for this. This is probably not right. And then Rick saw it, he loved it and he showed it to Bob and that was Rick Carter again. Yeah, rick Carter, yeah, who's a mentor. That kind of runs through my entire career.
Jennifer Coronado:So for a long time my skill as an illustrator was tied into Photoshop and I'd be working with other illustrators, artwork and whatnot, and it was always kind of to get it to look photo real and it was up to me in my own time to discover how to be a better illustrator. Doing that and when that happened was Minority Report. It's like I had a violin and I was playing Mary had a Little Lamb, and people were like check it out. And then all of a sudden, art Center, these guys are coming out and they're playing Vivaldi, and so you have people like James Klein, who's just an incredible illustrator, and I remember working on Minority Report. I wouldn't even hang out with those guys. I wouldn't have lunch with them because I knew they were going to see that it was a fraud. At a certain point I needed to go to them and say I need help, can you help me be a better illustrator? And they were so kind. I remember Jim explaining like outdoor light, indoor light how I could make my paintings look better.
Jennifer Coronado:So I started as an illustrator. I started doing Photoshop and letting the technology kind of hold me up. More people came in as an illustrator and more work was just being done purely in Photoshop. I was learning from my peers on how I can be better in Photoshop. I was learning from my peers on how I can be better On those shows. It might be like this is what the T-Rex nest is going to look like, or this is what I remember on Waterworld. I did marker and pencil sketches of what the weapons look like, that the smokers had. Or I did 3D models of what Kevin's boat was going to look like or what the Exxon Valdez. I did a Photoshop painting of that. So that was the kind of work I was doing as an illustrator. It's pretty.
Jennifer Coronado:Production designer based. Your relationships with the production designer, yeah, which will lead me to storyboarding Waterworld. Kevin Reynolds asked me if I would storyboard some scenes and I said I really don't do storyboards. Rick Carter had invited me over and I told him that this conversation happened and he said no, whenever you can get out of the art department and be with the director, be with the director, go back, tell him you can do it. And so I did. I told him oh, you know what I think I can do those storyboards. Now it was horrible, my figures were awful and whatnot, but I was going to get in and do that job and and so storyboarding is awesome. I love storyboarding. That's when you're in communication with the director and you're you're kind of doing a comic strip of of what that person wants, how, how they want to shoot the film, and that can be very specific, where a director will say I'm going to do this shot, I'm going to do this and I'm going to do that, and you're drawing that to get it laid out. But the best.
Jennifer Coronado:The absolute best is when a director gives you kind of a framework. You know, like Zemeckis, on what Lies Beneath. I was an art director but I was doing a lot of storyboarding because I had that dual card as an illustrator and he might go, wow, steph Harrison's going to come in here, then she's going to drown, he's going to do this to Michelle and this will happen and this will happen. And he'd give me a couple shots within there. But I could come in and lay out the scene and riff on it. So it's almost like you're playing music with the director. The director is kind of laying down a riff and you're coming back and then they're you're riffing off each other until the scene gets done. And that's that's when it's the absolute best. And zemeckis was the director I liked working with the best.
Stefan Dechant:He was just fun it's interesting because I'm going to jump past art director to supervising art director, and the reason that I'm doing that jumping from illustrated to that is because that's like the first time you got a deal of money, because a part of what a supervising art director does is help manage that budget and that takes you out of the creative as much.
Stefan Dechant:Right, so can you talk about? What was that like, fitting into that role and how did that feel? You've done it on jarhead. You did it on avatar. What did that feel? You've done it on Jarhead? You did it on Avatar. What did that feel like for you?
Jennifer Coronado:Okay. So this is how it happened. I had art directed a couple shows for Rick and I did Cast Away of what Lies Beneath with Rick, and those were special projects. Those were a production designer, knowing what I could give, giving me the title of art director. I was helping sets along, but I didn't come from drafting, getting the sets built, working with construction. How do you make it happen? I was learning while I was doing that, but I was in a special role. It was hard for me to get a job as an art director with someone I didn't know, because I wasn't sure I was going to live up to what they wanted me to do.
Stefan Dechant:And.
Jennifer Coronado:I hadn't had all the groundwork underneath me. My career has been kind of like running on top of crocodiles I just kept moving from one thing to the other and trying not to get eaten. My personal life was such that I couldn't commit the time that needs to be committed to art directing as well. So I went back to illustrating. And then I was illustrating on Jarhead and the supervising left the show and I seriously think Dennis Gassner who I love him and again another mentor of mine was just looking across the hall and like, well, this is not too difficult, I'll just have Stefan do it. So I became the art director on Jarhead and I know enough now from how I moved from crocodile to crocodile to like when the door opens, man, stick your foot in it, make sure it doesn't shut, and move through. But I didn't really know the scope of that show. You know how it was going to get done. I was smart enough to go. These are the things that need to get done. This is the money I need to track. This is how I'm going to do it. I don't know particularly, but I'm going to say I need to have these drawings by such and such a date right, and doing that.
Jennifer Coronado:Now I also needed another art director, or needed an assistant art director. And they said Dennis said call Christy Wilson. And so I called her up and she said well, I'm really hunting for it. I'll do it if I can get an art director title and one of the things I've seen with Rick is not to get all caught up in titles and whatnot I'm like sure you can be an art director, I'm fine doing two art directors on this show. So I went to Dennis and I said, okay, she'll do it, but she's going to be an art, she wants to be an art director, a supervising art director. So that is how I got it and I didn't know what the hell I was doing and she could have come in and just thrown me under the bus, but she didn't. She helped me with her. She had a vast experience of art directing, more than I did, but she helped me plan out like this is when the drawing needs to get done, this is where the numbers are, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and I couldn't have done it without her.
Jennifer Coronado:What I took supervising art director to mean is like I'm going to help on this other level, get the film designed with dennis and, and how I relate to sam mendez, the best part about anything in this industry is you can kind of invent what you are, yeah, but a real. What I need when I'm a designer and a supervising art director, I need someone's got. They're making the hires, they're they're running those numbers, they're tracking that number, they're tracking it, you know, and actually they're having the battles. So I don't have to have the battles, so I can be the good cop. You know, sometimes you got to have some deep conversations with construction and the producers like, how are we going to get this done?
Jennifer Coronado:I wasn't that person. I don't know what I was, but I survived that show. I only became that person actually because I did another show, lady in the Water, where Christy was a supervising art director and I saw how she protected Martin Child, I saw how she organized that art department. So when I was hired on Avatar, I was hired as an illustrator and at that point I just saw that my skills couldn't, that I couldn't compete. I just wasn't on that level. You really needed to commit and that you're going to work on your skills at this level. But I did see that certain departments were a mess, and not in a bad way. They were trying to do it the best they could, but they needed an art director to come in, organize them, say this is how we're going to get it done, this is how we're going to get it, we're going to hit our marks here. And that all came from Christy. As a supervising art director, I could really I mean, you're not going to learn more than working with Rick for two years on a Jim Cameron movie. So when we did Alice and Rob Stromberg was designing for his first time, I could be that person that I knew he could rely on and go. I got it. Rob, you just keep painting, designing, do whatever you want. We'll keep you covered on this other side, where the sets get done.
Jennifer Coronado:One thing I realized in my career is I've been a bit of a manipulator. When Rob hired me to do Oz Great and Powerful, I didn't want to do the numbers anymore and I remember Rick and Rickard calls me because how's it going? I go. It's great. I made a new position for myself. He goes, what's that? I go. I'm Tom from the Godfather. He goes. That's a perfect position. I go, it is.
Jennifer Coronado:I hired another art director who can handle all the budgets and I'm there working with rob. He's got great vision, but I can be a guide, helping to go okay, we need to get this turned over. We need to get the drawings here. You know, I liked being in that position more than I liked doing the numbers, so I was a bit of a manipulator, but a good supervising art director and I've worked with quite a few. They run that art department. They should really be having more credit than they get. It really frees you up that you're in this create. You can be in this zone that's up here above everybody else. You can see it in the big picture and you can work with deeper ideas than you can when you're really handling the day-to-day in and out of it. It's a tough job. It's a really hard job.
Stefan Dechant:So I'm hearing lots of themes through your career before we launch into your production design, and lots of themes I'm hearing are connections, long-term relationships, mentoring, term relationships, mentoring. And then I'm hearing another theme which is a little bit of Stefan not necessarily thinking he was the right person for the role that someone just gave him, and so I want to ask you about moving into production design and how that happened for you and what are the best things, things about that and what are, like, the personal stressors around having to own a film production art department.
Jennifer Coronado:I think when you have a combination of Catholicism and Midwest, that you're very susceptible to imposter syndrome, and I do have that a bit. So that's that part that might be coming out. I'm not sure how to deal with it properly, right, but I try to use it to work harder to go somewhere deeper. So, to answer your other question, in terms of production design, I had been working on Osgrate and Powerful and I actually couldn't take that film through because my kids were born. I have twins and once we found out we were having twins oh, by the way, I ended up marrying Christy.
Stefan Dechant:Well then, she managed everything really well. She still does.
Jennifer Coronado:Trust me, we did quite a few films together, so one where I was supervising, one where she was supervising About a year after we had settled in our new house and the twins they were doing well. I was hired to kind of oversee reshoots, because Robert Stromberg wasn't available and you're given the title production designer but me doing reshoots for Oz. I was not the production designer, I was still a supervising art director, protecting Rob's designs and creating a couple of new sets, but making sure that I did that in the way that Rob would have. And when I was doing that, pete Deming, the DP, was talking with his agents about me and so ICM called and said they wanted to rep me and so I had some meetings with them and they said what you need to do is you've got to focus on being a production designer now and you can't be an art director, which is hard because that just means you're not bringing your money coming in. And I started having meetings and I was really good at being the second choice on a lot of films.
Jennifer Coronado:And the thing about connections came in the producer of Jarhead, who I had met before earlier. He was a guy named Sam Mercer and while I was in this dry patch of being everyone's second choice. Sam took a chance on me and at the time I was helping again Rick Carter as he comes back in. I was helping him out on Big Friendly Giant and I flew down to New Zealand and I was working with Weta Workshop and Weta Digital on getting the assets built for Big Friendly Giant and Sam said, if you come in and do this, I can sit you up for the interview for another film that I was interested in. But Legendary was very kind and called me and said we're going to hunt for another film for you, and that film ended up being Kong. And I met Jordan Voight-Roberts on Kong, skull Island yeah, skull Island and we had a pretty good meeting and I got a call from my agent saying look, jordan likes you, but he doesn't know what you're going to be able to provide. So I was able to leave New Zealand early, come back.
Jennifer Coronado:But at that night I went out and sketched out some keyframes and then I called friends and said can you help me? Could you illustrate something for free for me? And so in a week I had three outside illustrations and three illustrations I had done and I met with Jordan and that's what got me the job. So now you're in a position that you don't know what. You don't know Like I've never production designed before. I don't know how I'm going to make this happen.
Jennifer Coronado:I'm just stepping in to make it happen and I have instincts and I have a very young director who's not like the directors I've worked with before, and it can be intimidating, and one of those intimidations was that he had brought in all these illustrators. He had like maybe eight, nine illustrators working across the globe and they were working for him, and I was very intimidated by that, and so it was very hard for me to get in sync with him, and it was over Christmas that I thought oh wait, here's the way I'm going to see this. John Barry was the designer of Star Wars. John Barry designed those sets. When you're a kid, all you hear about is Ralph McQuarrie and Joe Johnson, but you don't hear Cal and Cal. Well, all these other guys you don't hear about John Barry that much.
Jennifer Coronado:As a kid, I was like okay, I doubt John Barry was going around going oh, this Ralph McQuarrie is doing stuff. So it was a way for me to kind of take what I had already known instinctively as a kid and through my moving up to my career, and apply it and go OK, this is where I'm going to go. Jordan is George and, as I recall, a lot of guys in London were like what is this guy doing? I'm going to have faith in him because he's going to be my George Lucas. I'm going to follow his lead. He's got it so much in the head. He's working with these illustrators. That's fine. They're going to be the Ralph and the Joe Johnston of the show. I'm going to be the John Barry and I'm going to design the environments and the sets to work with what Jordan's doing and make that happen.
Jennifer Coronado:The way I work is I lay everything out either in my mind some of it's like a whiteboard in my mind and it's making the connections. What are these connections that weren't existing before, and sometimes even as a designer, I have to make those up not to keep me interested, but it might be something that the director's not there going for or I share with the director he likes. So, for example, for Welcome to Marwen, about a guy who rebuilds his world with dolls, the idea I had was that scale is a way of keeping people away, protecting himself. They can't enter that world, but at the end, when he shares it, when he has his photographs, at the end of that movie, we're gonna. Scale is broken, so we'll print these things so their life size, that either. Bob took that idea and he liked it.
Jennifer Coronado:I was able to go with Jordan like to look at these disparate images and go, oh, I see the story that's happening here. Maybe this leads to this. So Jordan has a guy and the natives and they're painted with electronic keyboards on their face, right, it looks like electronics. And I'm thinking, like what, why are they doing that? And then I thought, well, maybe, maybe it's their language and they're writing the language in jordan like that. It was like that was cool.
Jennifer Coronado:I go, but wait a minute, maybe we could do this too. Maybe we write the language on the walls, so it's also like a camouflage, so that whenever they, if they can, get to a place they built that has this pattern on it. That's how they, they protect themselves, which jordan dug too. Now, any idea you come up with, whether you're the storyboard artist, the art director, the pa production designer, you give it to the director. Once you give it to the director, it's their idea. So it's not me saying this, is mine alone and I'm responsible for it. It's like I found a way to make these connections to make a fertile area that Jordan could grow something out of mixing all kinds of metaphors there.
Stefan Dechant:For me that all wraps back up to something, stefan, and then I don't know if you see it in yourself which is being a kid growing up outside chagrin falls, ohio, seeing the different things in your grandparents world and how they look differently and how they can be little stories and how you were drawing. Like all of that stuff has come into fruition in you just being a production designer.
Jennifer Coronado:Yeah, I think it's about dialogue too. Like I appreciate this dialogue with you because it helps me think about my own process and I think it's important for people to be in dialogue with the people they work with. Like I would love it if it was outside of even this podcast to just kind of see you and Dave and the guys and just kind of talk, continue the conversation on even a larger term. But, like you said, I am in dialogue with myself, so much so that I was designing matte paintings for True Grit and when the little girl rides away on Blackie, one of the buildings in the background says Bollinger Cut right, it's the name of the building. And that was the drugstore that I used to go to in my grandparents' town and that's where I would buy my Star Wars comic books and my silly putty and bad model kits and whatnot, and it was just a way for me to weave that all back in there.
Stefan Dechant:Thank you very much for your time today.
Jennifer Coronado:Thanks, thank you.
Stefan Dechant:Thank you for listening to. Everyone Is. Everyone Is is produced and edited by Chris Hawkinson, executive producer is Aaron Dussault, music by Doug Infinite. Our logo and graphic design is by Harrison Parker and I am Jen Coronado. Thank you for listening.
